Storage Guide

Hitachi GST Ships Two New 4TB Deskstar-Based HDDs

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has launched two Deskstar-based 4TB hard disk drives early this week. The Deskstar 5K4000 is a 3.5-inch HDD with 5,400rpm CoolSpin technology, 32MB drive cache and SATA 6.0Gbps interface. The Touro Desk family of external hard drives are available in capacities up to 4TB and feature the Deskstar 5K4000 inside.

The Deskstar 5K4000 provides about 33% more storage capacity than the current offerings of 3TB desktop HDDs. This disk also features Hitachi's Advanced Format feature that increases the sector size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes (4KB), which in turn boosts capacity and offers improvements to error correcting capabilities.

The Deskstar 5K4000 will be made available to consumers in a retail kit that comprises mounting screws, instructions and the Hitachi GPD Disk Manager, an easy-to-use software application designed to overcome the 2.2TB limitation of 32-bit Windows operating systems. The retail kit is currently shipping in limited quantities to online and retail stores with a suggested retail price of US$399.99.

The family of Touro Desk external drives has been updated with a new member that features the new 4TB storage capacity. Housing the Deskstar 5K4000, the Touro Desk 4TB external HDD will be made available in January 2012 with a SRP of US$419.99. Bundled with the drive will be Hitachi's own cloud storage solution for consumers and the first 3GB of cloud storage is free from HitachiBackup.com. The capacity of Hitachi's cloud storage service can be upgraded to 250GB with an annual fee of US$49 and it comes with an exclusive iOS application for iPhones and iPads. The new 4TB disk model will only be available with an USB 3.0 interface, whereas the rest of the range is available in a USB 2.0 version as well.